Muscle for Life

Muscle hypertrophy is a confusing subject. Hell, it’s a confusing word. How do you even say it? (Hi-PUR-trophy). And what does it mean, exactly? (It’s the technical term for muscle growth.) Some people say that the best way to stimulate muscle hypertrophy is to use different rep ranges to develop different kinds of muscle fibers. Some say that there are different kinds of muscle hypertrophy—"myofibrillar" and "sarcoplasmic"—and if you aren't emphasizing both in your training then you're leaving gains on the table. If you want bigger muscles, you're told, you want to maximize sarcoplasmic hypertrophy, and you do that by training with light weights and high reps, supersets, and so forth. And if you want stronger muscles, you want to maximize myofibrillar hypertrophy, and you do that by training with heavy weights and low reps. Then, others say that muscle hypertrophy is almost entirely genetic. They say your DNA determines whether you can build a lot of muscle or not, and how you train isn't going to make much